Many aspects of electronic communication, and in particular electronic commerce, is based on business documents that parties can exchange over a computer connection. A big problem in current e-Business is the variety in structure and description of business information and business documents. The absence of uniform and standardized methods for the common representation of the structure and semantics of business data led to today's situation where there is an increasing growth of different representations of electronic business information and documents. Currently it is not possible to exchange business documents electronically between two business partners without previous coordination and manual mapping between different document structures and semantics. A world-wide accepted syntax for representation exists with extensible markup language (XML), but this does not solve the problem of non-uniform semantics and structure.
Some business documents are based on reusable building blocks that define the semantics of the document data. An example of a standard that defines such building blocks is the electronic business UN/CEFACT Core Elements Technical Specification issued by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, which specification is hereafter referred to as CCTS. The CCTS is the first standard which combines all necessary aspects for human legibility and automatic machine processing so that an integrated interoperability can be guaranteed. The CCTS based building blocks are syntax free and very flexible, because they are based on a modular concept. Business information can be assembled for all demands by reusable building blocks. “Syntax free” means that these building blocks can be generated in arbitrary representations, like XML, ABAP Objects or Java classes. However, the semantics described by the CCTS do not change. This guarantees one general naming convention for the unambiguous composition of semantic information. This mechanism is comparable with the grammar and words of a naturally-spoken language, because a naturally-spoken language can also be represented in many different ways (by writing or by speech), and the semantics are always the same.
The layout and form information for the visual presentation of current business documents is typically described in an external script file. The script file is used when the document is printed, or displayed in a graphical user interface (GUI). Examples of these files include extensible stylesheet language transformation (XSLT) files, XSL formatting object (XSL:FO) files or extensible data processor (XDP) files. Such files are separate from, and describe layout properties of, the business document, such as a purchase order or an invoice.
One disadvantage with the use of external script files is that there is no tight conjunction of the reusable building blocks the XML schema (like address and location of a business document) and the reusable parts of the layout information. If a new document is to be assembled using an XML schema, complete new layout information must be developed using a script language. Furthermore, current browsers understand only the layout information and do not handle the semantics and structure of reusable building blocks based on XML schemas. Such browsers do not perform a validation of incoming XML based business documents, and do not generate XML based building blocks in a very generic way so that everyone (humans and applications) can understand the business documents.